Category: Poetry

The sirens went off, and there was silence again.

Call and response, hear the tiny wrens.

“Where have all the planes gone?” one twittered.
“I can’t get my bearings,” said the other.

Said a third;
“The hummers used to show us where to land.”

It was like the second when your eyes meet, then you look away, and blush before blushes, the second the scent of skin seems to come over you because you move closer, but not close enough, like when a thousand butterflies land and come together before you get dizzy, and yes, swoon, very much like the time, walking arm in arm at night, when it occurs to you that you could actually faint, just before you faint, and the comets meet you at eye level, then rain down on you, and say it won’t last forever.

I can write the loneliest verses today.

Say, for example, “Alone is soft.”

Are we alone?

It doesn’t matter anymore, what’s below my feet.
The Scottish Play says “quiet.”

I didn’t have the heart to wake you.
It’s only a blanket.

Soft around the oils.
Breath falling.

Eyes close in blue ridges. Dreams come.
Never again. Sometimes.

Breeze through the glories
Vines like a river, like a wave
Painted gold, leaves shimmering

When my eyes told you I love you,
you tried to touch me with your tendrils.
Your dress, worn softly and falling apart,
revealed a mouse’s treasure beneath your blooms.
And purple trumpets, emerging from your shoulders,
announced the morning rain.

Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

The cars are a river that wake with me
Silver and silent, going nowhere

The planes are up at 6 am, but their song isn’t pretty
Instead they sear the sky and hit the birds,
blood and feathers in the wings

The lights come on
but they aren’t the sun or the bright moon
They are green and harsh

Sometimes they are red
and pavlovian

She is erased, but I still watch her
The drunk, there
Looks like no other
glassy, unseeing
peering out from the pain

ethanol sits there between us
waving like the summer heat
so there’s no embrace
only breath perception

you can’t, you aren’t
I am not
I am

the tears don’t come, and I’m more sad than angry
but I don’t miss her anymore